Khayaal

Inspiration

Women in Pakistan don’t have a space to engage and elevate ideas. Often times, men occupy all spaces of public conversation.

What it does

Khayaal caters to 18-34 year old women. Our solution is a 3 pronged approach using a multimedia platform:

Storytelling soundbite episodes: Similar to NPR, we provide the resources for women to share their stories using SoundCloud. We use a storytelling format to communicate their experiences in a compelling and inspiring way.

A community oriented social network: By digitally engaging users on Facebook, we create an active user base that brings together communities of women that create awareness.

A community oriented website: By leveraging our social network and soundbites, women can engage in idea sharing and conversations by voluntarily sharing their story, commenting on the stories of others, or submitting topics they’d like to hear about.

How I built it

Our multimedia platform consists of a website and episode soundbites using a downloadable Soundcloud link created from a survey of topics sent to a network of Urban Pakistani women. The users are then target via Facebook ads to click on our website and/or listen to an episode.
The soundbite prototype was created using SoundCloud and a speaker volunteer within our market. The soundbite url was marketed using Facebook ads and Google ads to test:

whether women would listen to the soundbite

whether women would engage with the soundbite

whether women would organically search for the website

whether they would align with our audience

the platform which women were accessing the content

Challenges I ran into

Initially we wanted to desperately immediately reach rural women through radio shows. After testing, there was no denying that our true audience was urban women.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We created our first soundbite with overwhelming cooperation from an overseas market.

What I learned

Overcoming the want and need to do everything. We learned it's important to validate our assumptions by building, learning, and measuring rather than going with "good ideas".

What's next for Khayaal

We've concluded that most users access Khayaal's content through a mobile device. Our next step is to engage a mobile app for these mobile women.